So you're ready to kick off your first Scrum project and you ask the inevitable question - Where do I begin? You start in the same place innumerable product teams have started before. You gather requirements. Lots of organizations gather all the requirements at once, building a pristine Product Requirements Document (PRD) that Can Never Change. Scrum doesn't do this. Instead, you can look at a requirements gathering as a good place to start, but it's not where you're going to finish. The first thing ......

My last post was about deciding on what Scrum tools you'd be using before you jump into the process. I imagine readers like myself who are new to Scrum or are constantly looking at ways to do it better. So for those folks, I'll say that in the past three weeks I've learned, definitively, that the currently available Scrum tools won't force you into implementing Scrum more efficiently. They're all good tools that require you, quite frankly, to know what you're doing. So I'll try to break this down ......

if you're adopting Scrum you'll need to decide what level of tooling you'll use. Are you going to use sticky notes on a whiteboard? An expensive 3rd party solution? My opinion is that If you're just learning Scrum it's worth the investment to learn the tools you're most likely to use long-term. For general Agile software development I've been completely happy with Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). When you install TFS plus Visual Studio plus Team Explorer, you get the complete package of document ......